There are several reasons why WordPress has become arguably the most popular content management system in the world – more than 18% of all websites are powered by WordPress. It’s free, easy-to-use, and is extremely SEO friendly.
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Despite WordPress being a powerful tool right out of the box, you still have to rely on plugins to improve the functionality of your site and enhance the experience of your visitors. As you also already know, there are plenty of plugins available that can help with SEO optimization—most of which are free.
We recently published a post about great SEO plugins for WordPress. But, there’s several more we hadn’t covered yet, so we mention a few more below.
Yoast SEO
There’s a lot that goes into optimizing your website and we recommend starting with Yoast SEO. With over 14 million downloads and an average star rating of 4.6, this is a great jumping-off point and the one to rely on to whip your content into shape. It’s great at providing you with a perspective on what works and what doesn’t, through testing and grading various parts of your website’s content, giving you a preview of how your page results show in Google, and helping you clean up bad links or coding.
Google Analytics by Yoast
We can’t stress enough the importance of keeping track of your website’s performance and trends in order to better shape your website’s content and, consequently, your business. Yoast offers two versions of their Google Analytics plugin, but we think the basic (free) version is a good place to start. With this plugin, you’ve got a snapshot of Google Analytics that will allow you to keep track of your site’s activity—all within your WordPress portal.
Squirrly SEO
We talk a lot about appeasing the search engine gods, but what about the human aspect of your readership? If you’ve got the Yoast SEO plugin already, this is a great way to supplement that as it’ll give you a helpful snapshot of how your content is performing. Through weekly audits of your content, it’ll also nudge you towards the high-performing keywords on your site and help target your content efforts more effectively.
WP Social SEO Booster
The search engines (i.e. Google) are continuously updating their search ranking factors and it’s your job to evolve with the trends. It’s no surprise that social media has become one of the factors that now play into your website’s visibility in the search engines. Using a plugin like the WP Social SEO Booster helps you easily integrate Google microdata and social media metadata (Facebook, Twitter, Google+) into your website, and naturally increase your ranking.
SEO Friendly Images
Have you been meticulous about labeling the photos you use on your website? At the time, you probably didn’t consider adding that information would help with your search rankings. (But it does!) The SEO Friendly Images plugin will take care of this for you and automatically add the ALT and TITLE labels to all images on your website.
Sitemap Generator for Webmasters
Sitemaps aren’t just for the copy on your website. You can use them to establish a map to all images and videos on your website, and give the search engines the opportunity to find these crucial pieces of your website that may not otherwise be found.
Broken Link Checker
There’s nothing more annoying than seeing something you want to read more about, only to discover the link is broken. Keep your website’s integrity intact with the Broken Link Checker and let this plugin keep tabs on your website and all its moving pieces for you —from blog posts to pages and images to links.
Redirection
Giving your website a boost with a new design or new location is always a great idea in theory, but what happens to all those people who were following you and the search engines that determined your ranking in your previous iteration? With a new url structure, you’ve got to find a way to keep those connections intact and a 301 redirect is the way to do it. Use this plugin to easily redirect your old website pages to the new ones and keep your connections (and search engine reputation) in tip-top shape.
SEO Data Transporter
This plugin isn’t really about giving you a leg up in the SEO race. It’s more about making sure you sustain all that time and energy you’ve invested in your SEO efforts in the case that you decide to switch themes or plugins.
Local Search SEO Contact Page
Search engines rely on the structure of websites to be coded in a certain fashion. When it comes to your Contact page and making sure your business’s information is easy for the search engines to extract, give this plugin a whirl. It’ll also help in generating all those little things needed to translate your geographic location into search results.
Majestic SEO Dashboard Widget
Your WordPress dashboard is a wonderful place to go for a snapshot of how your website and all its moving pieces are performing. With a plugin like this, you can track your link building efforts against your competitors’ websites to see what more can be done to get your site noticed.
SEO Smart Links
When it comes to blogging, the more metadata you add, the better. This plugin will find ways to link regularly occurring keywords and phrases within your blog posts, pages, and comments, ultimately keeping the separate pieces of your website interlinked with one another.
Use Google Libraries
Did you know that many of the JavaScript libraries distributed on WordPress are also hosted on Google’s AJAX libraries API? This matters because it could hinder the performance of your site by slowing it down. This plugin assists with taking a load off of your server and so your WordPress site runs faster.
Conclusion
While there are more than enough WordPress plugins to help give your SEO a little boost, remember to download them from trustworthy authors – checking out reviews and when the last update occurred can tell you if they are trustworthy or not. The last thing you want to do is to jeopardize the security of your site.
Except for that friendly reminder, if you have had any success with the plugins mentioned, please share your experiences in the comments. And, if I forgot to include an awesome SEO plugin, please share!
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